Re: Misc thoughts.

[Peter Mardahl <peterm@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU>]

In message <199410121500.AA26567@tel.vtt.fi>, Tero Haatanen writes:

>
>> >Basic problems:
>> >Spell casters (especially level 10+) tend 
>> >to have many advantags over fighters.
>> 
>> This is inherent.  Throwing a hand-grenade into a room is always going
>> to be quicker and safer than going in and chopping everything to pieces.
>
>I have to disagree. When you have thrown that grenade and missed then that
>sword should be useful. But that is where the current maps comes in the 

One does NOT miss with a large fireball.  You do NOT miss with cone spells.
You DO hit many monsters at once with less risk.

>play. There are so many maps where players can kill big room full of 
>dragons just casting fireballs through one square width door. Fighters 
>would have enourmous advantage over wizards if it would be fight with one 
>chinese dragon in room in which there aren't any safe spots.

NOT true.  A wizard can hit all 4 squares of a chinese *at the same time*.
He can spew 5-6 burning hands spells all at once, doing > 1000pts/tick
to the dragon.  *no* fighter can match this without an improved weapon.

>Making more monsters protected from magic and vulnerable to physical
>damage could help also. Or maybe spells are too powerful?

I propose two things to cut down on spells effectiveness:
1)  stop the propagation of cones *through* monsters.  
2)  stop the propagation of fireballs *through* monsters.

>> Gee, how about a 4-class split?  :)  We can then balance the game
>> easily by making it very hard to advance as a mage (takes a LOT of exp
>> from killing with spells to advance) and relatively easier for
>> fighters.
>
>I don't like a 4-skill system. It's not so flexible or easier implement
>than different skills for different things (fighting/casting/healing/
>searching/using bows/using wands/etc). The different classes could

It is too easier to implement.

>have different starting values and other parameter telling how easily
>they learn it better. This could be used even for each spell or 
>spell-path.

Oh, come on.  The complexity of the coding necessary to handle skills
for each spell path or whatever is much more than 4 skills, hardwired.

>Isn't there already variable telling how much experience is needed
>to next level? It could made already so that wizards needs twice
>as much experience as fighters to advance levels.

Not true.  Everyone is both a fighter and a wizard.  It would be easy
to scale the experience gained from kills with magic though.  If you
just made it so object 'fighter' advanced quicker than object 'wizard'
you'd just see people using 'fighters' to wiz.

>
>> It's simple enough to rationalize making it difficult to have such
>> an improved weapon AND cast spells around it.  
>
>If there is weapon which is meant to wizards to use, then this don't
>make sense.

Sure it does.  A powerful artifact might well make spells cast nearby
go awry.

>But once you have solved the quest then it's easy to solve again. And
>if you drop all other items then the god have to enchant that only 
>item what you have left. Also you probably would be quite upset if 
>your god destroys your weapon after you have killed all monsters and
>finished the quest.

Did I forget to comment that a given quest would only improve a weapon
up to some maximum, set by the difficulty of the quest?


Regards,

PeterM